eldavojohn writes: Netflix is coming under fire for hiring actors to talk to the media at a launch of their Canadian service. A handout sheet instructed the actors to portray stereotypes of "mothers, film buffs, tech geeks, and couch potatoes." The Netflix representative in charge apologized and claimed that it was never meant to go that far — that in order to get a permit they pretended like they were filming a documentary and so they hired a few actors who were just supposed to attract a crowd and not talk to the media. The handout script provided to the actors from Netflix does a good job of contradicting that explanation however, 'Extras are to behave as members of the public, out and about enjoying their day-to-day life, who happen upon a street event for Netflix and stop by to check it out. Extras are to look really excited, particularly if asked by media to do any interviews about the prospect of Netflix in Canada.' Perhaps they were having a hard time finding anything but Zip.ca fans?

Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday September 22, 2010 @11:10AM
from the my-fridge-is-powered-by-fire dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, 'No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die,' as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path. Now a team of Yale physicists has used lasers for a completely different purpose, employing them to cool molecules down to temperatures near absolute zero, about -460 degrees Fahrenheit. Their new method for laser cooling, described in the online edition of the journal Nature, is a significant step toward the ultimate goal of using individual molecules as information bits in quantum computing."

troll? I'm glad someone got my point, this is all about trolling. The GOP is a massive troll organization, as evidenced by their recent 'census' money grab. The party is all about con'troll'ing free thought and replacing it with empty values while profiting off of the whole deal.

America should start sending their idiot conservatives like Palin and Limbaugh to Australia. This worldwide surge of stupid "won't someone think of the children and our values (while padding our bank accounts)" is washing up on too many shores lately.

Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday February 11, 2010 @10:09AM
from the i-blame-hormes dept.

Xiroth writes "Google has rejected overtures from the Australian government to censor YouTube clips that had been given an RC rating by Australian classification authority, the OFLC. According to a Google spokesperson: 'YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can't give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube.
The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy.'"

Menchi writes: The EU parliament just rejected an earlier decision by the EU council to grant the US unlimited access to all banking data (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/11/27/150234/EU-About-To-Grant-US-Unlimited-Access-To-Banking-Data). This earlier decision was made on the last day before the treaty of Rome, which would have granted the parliament a vote in this matter, came into effect. After the rejection of the treaty by a parliamentary group last week (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/06/1836221/EU-Committee-Says-No-To-Bank-Data-Sharing), the whole parliament rejected it with 378 to 196 votes.

the3stars writes: "Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas."

This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma. Maybe Jesus died of a brain tumor.

eldavojohn writes: Reuters brings word of professor Leonard Waverman's annual Connectivity Scorecard study that looks at nationwide usage of telecommunications technologies (networks, cellphones and computers). For the first time the United States is not number one, they are number two. It's a tight race for number one, closely following the US is Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Finland (in that order). The report doesn't look just at technological aspects of telecommunications but also concentrates on the economic gain and usefulness of that technology. This causes countries like Korea to finish eleventh (not as connected as they could be) but still rank near the top on the Digital Opportunity Index. The full 2009 report [PDF] can be found at connectivityscorecard.org.

rotmanz writes: Good news! Your new website is prim and prime for search engine optimization. Search engines work best with HTML, which is exactly the code your website uses, so you're already a few steps ahead of the game. This article is best implemented for small to medium sized websites. Larger websites will usually need to implement much more intricate campaigns and their webmasters will have different resources in any case, so we will just ignore them for now. So here is some information on how you can promote your website:

1. Creating a good title and description. These are called meta tags and can be seen in the source of your website. The third meta tag, the keyword meta is no longer relevant for indexing for the main search engines Google and Yahoo. Your title should be up to 60-70 characters (anything longer than that will be cut off) while the descriptions should be no longer than 155 characters (this includes spacing). Anything longer than that will be cut off with three dots. The descriptions will typically appear in search results, so take some time to write something marketing oriented, something that will draw visitors to your website and make them click on your link rather than the competitors.